Many of us are victims of stress. Stress is common among all working class people, regardless of age or sex. This is one reason why stress is prevalent everywhere in the world.

Medically speaking stress is bad for your health, i.e it can give severe damage to your brain or nervous system, no i am not a doctor but i can safely say stress is bad for health. And if that wasn’t enough stressing out in our day to day life is extremely easy! Yes you can get free stress and it is so contagious that any fool or stupidity of others can be the reason for your stress.

But leave all that aside and lets come to the point i want to share with you all, “blogging while stressed“.

99% of people fail at making money online

The reason?

99% of them are desperate, but what that has to do with stress? Quite simple, countless number of people are trying to make some extra cash online, while some dream of becoming over night millionaires. When we are desperate, we do whatever we can in order to try and get what we want. But hitting your heads on the wall or your legs on the floor won’t get you nowhere. Which is what 99% of us are doing.

Where is the creativity? The originality? Where is the passion? All i see is people trying to rip each other off. One person trying to copy the success of another or just simply doing what others ask you to. But even still you fail at making money online!

The more you fail, the more you are stressed

It comes to a point that you keep failing one trick after another, one method after another. All this leads to stress, or to be more specific ‘Information overload!’. What can you do after that? 99% of us will most likely quit. The left 1% will keep trying.

And when everything else fails, there is one last resort. That is blogging. Its not hidden the fact that there are millions of new blogs born everyday on the Internet. But most of these bloggers are ‘stressed out’ desperate money makers that are now trying their luck at blogging. But this simply won’t work!

Why? Because stress is bad for blogging. If you blog just to make money, 99% of the time you won’t make enough to pay off your hosting. Because blogging is not about just ‘making money online’, its about sharing your views, your opinions and thoughts to the world. But right now, all i see is a net filled with bogus people that ‘use’ blogging platforms to try build money making sites. [i don't call them blogs, because they are simply NOT!]

‘But i am a hardworking, Dedicated and Passionate Blogger’

Are you? We all say we are, but if you seek money from a blog which is not even a few days old and got around 2-3 posts, then that is not dedication or hard work.

If you blog about anything and everything and concentrate only on blogging about affiliate products or schemes that will earn you money, then you are not passionate.

What i will say is you are stressed, most stressed bloggers don’t even know what they are doing, they just want to ‘try’ everything. Without any research or knowledge regarding the niche they blog about. That is the difference between top bloggers such as problogger, jhon chow, etc and the rest of the bloggers. They have a passion about their niche and they are defiantly not stressed.

How to kill stress?

Stress is bad for blogging, simply because when you are stressed you are not creative. No matter how hard you try you cannot get par to the level you want to achieve. Not only will stress kill you, but it will kill your blog as well. If your blog posts are filled with stressful remarks or poor attempts to convince your reader into doing/buying/trying something then you are more likely to loose the few leftover visitors you have.

But there is always a cure. Even if you are not stressed in the real life at that particular moment, a portion of your brain keeps worrying or thinking about ‘how to make money online’ or anything that you do online. If you are a full time blogger, then your worry is definitely about ‘what to blog about next?’ How to get traffic? How to find new advertisers? Where to look for reliable affiliate programs? There are so many questions and tonnes of problems which we are likely to face before we could earn our first few $ online. But it’s not impossible, in fact all it requires is a calm and fresh mind.

Specially in the case of blogging, having a relaxed mind is very important. Because when you blog with a relaxed mind, the words flow out on there own. Its hard enough to maintain a blog, managing your plugins, keeping it updated, not messing up the database, keeping it organized, constantly trying to improve the looks, keep a track of your traffic and stats, keeping off spammers and finding new readers.

After reading all those tasks i am sure, most people would not want to get into blogging, but its not as hard, only the set up is. Thanks to wordpress it’s quite easy, but making money is NOT!

Now comes the hard part, how do you keep relaxed? How can you stay active and not get stressed every time something dint work?

The answer is : take a break. Clear your mind of all the things you heard and tried. Once your fresh and ready to give it another shot, come back and start working. We all know how important relaxation is to remove stress. So go on a vacation, watch a few movies or just hang out friends for a few weeks.

My Message : Stress is bad for blogging, and blogging is bad for making quick buck. Don’t blog if you want to make money as soon as you start and definitely don’t blog when you are desperate for it and have absolutely no knowledge in the field your blogging about. If you are blogging and have quit blogging because you don’t see much results, then its likely because of the stress you get when you try to make money online. Don’t give up, keep trying. But at the same time make sure you are not getting bored or stressed. Enjoy what you are doing, be passionate.

Don’t forget that giving free knowledge or sharing your opinion [it doesn't matter if others agree with you or not, you will most likely end up as a good or bad blogger] without hesitation is what makes up the concept of ‘blogging’. And when you do that, you will definitely build up a loyal base of readers. Don’t ask others to do something which you won’t do yourself. Simple as that.

Remember stressful and desperate posts will kill your blog!

*****

I guess i am making it too long, so take care. Give it a tweet if you appreciate my advice and find me on facebook. Until next time, good day,

SJ

‘Word of mouth’ advertising simply means spreading the words about a site, product or anything via humans. In other words, it is the most easiest, super performing and cheapest forms of advertising and/or marketing method. In our daily life, word of mouth is everywhere. Remember when your friend suggests you a song? Or a favorite restaurant? Or which car to buy? Or did they show you a amazing website they just found? How about that weight-loss product they which they used?

All of these are ‘word of mouth’ free marketing. It is a good method as long as your website, blog or forums falls under ‘general’ categories such as entertainment, music etc

Consumer vs Seller

How can word of mouth marketing benefit consumers?

I am no marketing genius, but i can tell you this. If i am about to buy a new car, i would definitely take advices. If i am going on a movie we would definitely watch the one which everyone seems to be talking about. Won’t you? As a result ‘word of mouth’ advertising is very beneficial to the consumers. Because it gives the us, the consumers the knowledge we need, the reviews, the experience and information of the product or simply the recommendation of what/what not when we need something.

For a seller, word of mouth is viral. If people are talking about ‘it’[assume 'it' to be whatever you want] then that ‘it’ is a hot money maker.Period. Every form of business uses the ‘word of mouth’ advertising methods. Be it by creating stunning advertisements for there products or creating controversial stories or reviews. This form of advertising cannot be out-beaten by any other. People are tend to do, to buy or to see what there family members, friends and everyone else is.

however its useless if you trying to sell something, do affiliate marketing, make money via adsense or cpa. because you are making your own family members and friends to buy something which isn’t worth the time or efforts you put in.

How can ‘word of mouth’ help small business/sites?

Specially on the Internet? Does word of mouth just means telling about your creations to your family and friends?

word of mouth is not limited to just ‘you telling your friends & family’ but in a more simplified sense, if your site is amazing and worth the time for your visitor then those visitor [who ever they are, from any corner of the world] will definitely tell others about your site, that is the word of mouth.

like how we come to find about sites such as facebook, youtube, blogger, bing, etc etc most of them are via word of mouth, not advertisements that you come across. Always remember content is king, no matter what your niche is, if you want to dominate it then concentrate on quality. Put your self in the shoes of your visitors and think like them.

Here is what i do, when i create a website, or a blog post or anything online. I first test it out myself and ask my friends to test it too. Then ask yourself,

• do i like this website?
• will i buy this product?
• is this webpage worth my time?
• am i enjoying the sites design?
• is this site user friendly?
• are these posts and information valid and worthy?
• Will this benefit me?
• Is this the right price?
• Are these information relevant to the topic?
• Will i recommend these to my friends?

be honest to yourself because you are visiting the site as a visitor and do what you would do while surfing other websites on the Internet.

How can i start the next ‘word of mouth’ revolution??

Easy there. Don’t get carried away, its not easy to get people talking. Specially for us bloggers, no one actually reads blogs these days – thanks to the countless number of ‘unwanted’ and ‘repetative’ blogs out there. But there is still hope.

Word of mouth is a very hard advertising & Marketing form. But it is very well worth the time & efforts you put in aswell.

There are always ways to make your site popular by ‘word of mouth’, how?

1. Create topics that are short, simple and to the point. Give your visitors what they are looking for, don’t send them on a wild goose chase.

2. Write about controversial topics, this would definitely get you lots of criticism, but on the other hand it is a good way to give short term boost to your website traffic, this method works best in sites related to celebrities and current world issues, etc

3. Comparison – compare a subject, a product or website with others or with yours. Give your honest opinion about these. This will help the visitors make a better choice while you play the role of a middlemen

4. Write about hot and current topics. Share your view, after all this is the Internet and the only reason you are going to be successful is by being honest to yourself and giving your opinion, within limits of course.[make sure you don't go wild, it could do the opposite of what you want lol]

5. Don’t try to force your visitors or clients into doing ‘word of mouth’ advertising, this is mostly seen in the case of ‘e-mail this to your friend’ ‘share it with your friend’ ‘send this to your friend and get this/that free’ etc. Such tricks are short-lived, maybe to get something those visitors might do as you ask, but you are forcing them to do so. And its a proven fact that the others who receive those emails or any sort of info from friends are less likely to visit your site or even try it out. It will be somewhere in the spam/junk folders.

6. Be funny, creative and think out of the box. No one is going to talk about you, if you are like every other ordinary blogger/seller. Word of mouth works when there is something ‘unique’ or should i say ‘crazy’ to discuss. But remember, it could be also embarrassing and life destructing if you do something extreme foolish, like most of those youtube stars do nowadays.

7. Don’t create a hoax, never lie. Have you seen about the story on CNN recently about a 6 year old boy flying away in a hot air balloon? and later it turned out to be a hoax. This is a best example of ‘word of mouth’. Sure it created a story and made it a international news. But now that is turned out to be a hoax, it is going to be opposite of the parents might have expected. Long story short, don’t lie just to get fame or popularity. Specially in the online world, fame & popularity is useless because its only limited to your ‘user name’ or a particular site. Creating a hoax in order to be famous or get good ‘word of mouth’ visitors is going to be very harsh later on. The consequences can be fatal in some cases lol

8. 1 small trick for ‘freebies sites’ is to give freebies for ‘free’. Did that make sense? Well here’s the thing, nowadays 90% of the freebies sites on the ‘Internet’ are NOT free. The site owner obviously wants to make money, its either a CPA or some sort of obstruction the visitor has to face in order to get his freebie. If your freebies are ‘free’ it will definitely get you lots of ‘word of mouth’ visitors. But then again, how will you make money? The answer to that question is easy. You make money by giving freebies. Do a search on google, there are many CPA networks that have ‘freebies’ offers which you get ‘paid’ for to promote. So imagine if you are extremely popular in your niche, this 1 cpa offer can bring you big bucks without forcing your visitors to fill unwanted surveys, etc.

Last but not the least remember to go according to your long term plans. Word of mouth can also be achieved if you keep it simple, honest and don’t concentrate on just making money!

Good luck & i would like to apologies for my delayed posting – thank you for being patient everyone.

regards, SJ

Its almost the same thing as a artist without imagination, a road without cars or a job without payment. Many blog owners who are successful knows the power of these small little files known as plugins and usually those who fail at blogging are the ones that never experimented with plugins.

Which is why you must know about your possibilities and expansion into the blogging world. WordPress is a excellent open source platform and the best fact about it that their are endless possibilities for creating your ‘dream blog’ with wordpress and getting almost any feature you want working in a wordpress blog and all this is possible because of plugins and widgets.

So i prepared this list of 10 most useful and must have plugins for any wordpress blogger. Also i have included 5 bonus plugins which are not a ‘must’ but helps in enhancing your blogs!

[Please note that the list is arranged alphabetically and all plugins are equally important]

1 . Akismet

Akismet is from the creators of wordpress itself and it is already available to you by default, i can’t imagine surviving without akismet. Akismet blocks and stops Spam in your blog which is a necessity for any active blog!

Akismet is free to use and it requires a API key for it to work, you need to register at wordpress.com and get a account, this account also grants you a AIP key to use with akismet anywhere on a wordpress blog.

2. Add to Any : Share/Bookmark/Email Button

This is one of my favorite plugin, this plugin is has been powering my blog and spreading it viraly since the start. The best part about is that its not ‘visibly abusing’ to your visitors and just a small button on the end of each post which has resulted in so many sharing and caring for my posts. I recommend this plugin to any blogger because it is a viral one!

3. All in One SEO Pack

This plugin is the backbone of my blog, its the life of my works because this is the plugin that has been generating endless amount of organic Google friendly traffic for me every month.

AIOS pack enables you to easily add keywords, title, description and meta tags to your post making it very search engine friendly, this plugin is a MUST if you want to generate organic Search engine traffic.

Using this plugin i am ranking in top 10 on Google for many keywords and my search engine traffic is never less then 300 unique every month from Google for those keywords, which is a very big thing for me considering that this blog is only 2 months old.

4. Comment Luv

Spread the luv!

Comment luv is a plugin that enables you to give back to your readers, using this plugin the people who comment on your post has the ability to use a snippet of their own blogs feed, which means that they would love to comment on your blog! This plugin helps you get social – in few short words it will increase your comments count because their are people who loves comment luv blogs.

You need to register on the comment luv website to get it, but its free so welcome to the community!

5. Comment Relish

Ever wondered how to get loyal visitors? or increase the amount of your RSS subscribers? or better yet thank your visitors for participating on your site?

Well Comment Relish does just that! It will send a automated personalized message, just like a auto-responder from aweber or getresponse, the best thing about it is that it won’t spam your commentators, it only sends the message once per email. So that means you can thank them for commenting on your blog when they do it for the first time only!

I use comment relish to remind those readers of subscribing to my RSS feeds and to follow me on twitter, this is working like a charm and is really helping in the growth of my blog at the same time not spamming the commentators to death.This plugin is also free.

6. Contact Form 7

This is a must have plugin for every blog, specially for every new blog!

Contact form solves a very big issue among wordpress bloggers which is having a ‘contact form’ using which your visitors could contact you, it builds your own branded contact form which does the job very well, you can add and include custom fields and can have a form about anything you want, be it feedback forms, contact us form or selling advertising on your site. Plus its really easy to use and insert on your pages.

7. Google Analytic Plugin

If you don’t have this plugin in your blog then you rather stop blogging right now!

Google analytic plugin easily connects your Google analytic account and wordpress blog, this plugin is important because you want to know each and everything that is happening with your blog and the outside world. Tracking your visitors and then optimizing yourself to perform better is what every successful blogger does and this is the sole reason why you need to use Google analytic.

8. Google XML site maps

Since Search Engine traffic what matters most for any blogger, you need to provide the search engines with a ‘passage’ to each and every corner of your blog!

This is where this plugin comes into play, smartly designed this plugin creates XML site maps which tells the google bot of the whereabouts of your pages, posts and every single corner of your site, the more the bot crawls the more higher are your chances of SE traffic and higher rankings!

9. TweetMeMe Button

Twitter is perhaps the most viral social media till now and its really easy to take advantage of this!

Tweetmeme button makes it easy for your visitors to tweet/retweet your blog posts and spread the word, the one thing i noticed is that tweetmeme button gets more attention then any other share/save buttons which makes it viral and infectious! This is also used by industry giants such as mashable and tech crunch and it usually creates a twitter trend for them, so why not take advantage of this?

10. Digg this Button

Digg is very well known to everyone, which is why you need a ‘digg this’ button to get your articles and blog posts on the top!

The best use of digg this button is getting your posts indexed fast, believe it or not but search engines loves ‘social buzz’ and digg has helped me to get some of my posts indexed in less then 12 hours which is very good and welcoming news for us bloggers!

Bonus Plugins

These plugins are not a ‘must have’ but their use are really fantastic which is why they are making to this list!

1. DoFollow plugin

This plugin removes the evil ‘nofollow’ tags from your blog and thus increasing the amount of attention and comments you get on your blog, but be warned you need to use ‘akismet’ if you want to use this one because it will double the amount of spam comments you receive!

2. FeedBurner FeedSmith

Feeds are the heart of any blog and having subscribers to your feeds is important! This plugin detects all possible ways to access your feeds and redirects them to feed burner making it easy for you to track your subscribers.

3. Subscribe to Comments

This plugin gives the option to your visitors to subscribe to other comments on a blog, thus increasing the amount of comments and social interaction among your readers.

4. Top Commentators widget

More like a widget then a plugin but you need the plugin installed and activated in order for the widget to work, it enables you to show your top 5,10 or any number of commentators on your blog, this creates a competitive spirit among your readers and increases the amount of social interaction and comments on your blog. The widget can be displayed easily on your sidebar, footer or any widgetized space using the widget tools from your blog dashboard.

5. WP-Cumulus

Evey wordpress blog uses tags, but displaying those tags in your sidebars looks very ugly.This plugin makes your tags look more organized and cool, by displaying them in a flash embedded 3-d space.

That’s all for the top plugins but remember you need to add them to your plugin directory and adjust the settings of each individually, and respect the copyrights of the plugins.

Also many plugins might not go with your current themes so you will have to test them before that, and some themes requires certain plugins to be functional such as limit post plugins or page navigation plugins, these plugins are common which is why they are not included in the list, these plugins are supplied by the theme owner or designer.

P.S i don’t like spam and i don’t recommend you to abuse any of these plugins and spam!

Don’t forget to share and Buy me a smile (see sidebar) and of course join me on twitter, my fan page & subscribe to the feeds to stay updated. Till then have a great day,

SJ

Its not even 2 months since the launch of my blog, and recently Google made me very happy!

My blog is now PR 2, which is a very welcome news for me and am working on it to take it to even more higher my goal is PR5 or higher so the journey is going in the right direction so far.

In case you don’t know what PR[page rank] is, it is a way Google uses to show the popularity of a web page, my domain i.e sameerjoad.com is currently PR2. I will write soon about how you can increase your PR and gain good back links to rocket your popularity.

I am not yet sure if i should start selling advertising on the blog but time will tell.

Also as a surprise to all of you guys, the blog is now a ‘DoFollow’ which means that when you comment on the post and submit links, then those links are worth to the search engines,which will increase your page rank so participate as much as you can. In case you don’t know links you submit via comments on blogs have a ‘noFollow’ attribute assigned to them, which tells the search engines that these links are not valuable, you can remove this ‘nofollow’ attribute by using this plugin and making your blog a ‘DoFollow’ which means that your readers all benefit when they participate in the discussion, a win-win situation for all so why not?

To check weather a blog is ‘Dofollow’ or ‘nofollow’ right click the comment authors name[the authors name is where the link submitted by him is located], and click properties, you will see something called ‘link relation’ if it says ‘external’ then the blog is a ‘Dofollow’ and those links are worth it, and if its a ‘nofollow’ or ‘external nofollow’ then commenting on those blogs won’t benefit your search engine rankings in any way! To come to think of it, many people comment on top blogs including john chow etc to gain link backs, but no one knows that most of those blogs are ‘nofollow’ so their is no point in comment just for link backs!

Anyways keep reading and thanks a lot for all the comments and feedback, if you guys have anything to say contact me on sj@sameerjoad.com or use the contact form [don't spam]

EDIT : The recent PR update of October 2009, did not affect the PR of my blog,
it is still PR2 so i guess i should start more link building now:P

Update June 2011: I have removed ‘Dofollow’ links due to too many spam comments that i get, i guess its not worth it since people just want a free back-link and don’t genuinely read the blog or the post. Regarding the PR, it has dropped to PR 1. But i guess it should be PR 2+ in the next update if it ever comes. Google removed PR from its webmaster tools and asked webmasters to concentrate on other things then the PR, so i guess PR isn’t of any importance anymore.

I will add more features soon so stay tuned.

Don’t forget to share and Buy me a smile (see sidebar) and of course join me on twitter, my fan page & subscribe to the feeds to stay updated. Till then have a great day,

SJ

Traffic is the most precious asset of any website, blog or online business, and almost all new start ups fail in protecting traffic loss, which results in their business being paralyzed before they could even start to the fullest potential.

But the most important thing is, that those who fail in this are mostly the ones that do not realize the difference between ‘real people’ and the term ‘traffic’, but i can’t blame them, because the so called gurus teach them about traffic as if it is some bots which will pump us money like a ATM, but on the other hand those who learn about the value of traffic and understands the needs and requirements of those people who visit their sites and then use the learned information to optimize their service are the ones that will really make money online.

So keeping that in mind, i did my research and found lots of interesting things and facts that will make traffic coming to your site vanish. So this is how you can ‘not’ lose traffic from your sites, do and don’t of blogging. Remember making money blogging isn’t rocket science, all you need to do is learn by trial & errors.

1. Less advertising: Don’t Offer any advertising on your website or blog if its less then 30 days old.

2. Stick with your niche: Make sure your website carters to the needs of the subject on which its built upon, i.e stick with your niche don’t wander off.

3. Don’t fake comments: Do not do fake comments on your posts or add fake subscribers to your feed burner.

4. Engage: Participate actively in communication by replying to comments on your posts.

5. Be Original: Make sure your content is original, fake content of any sort, even PLR and MRR articles are useless and it could hurt your search engine rankings as well.

6. Don’t annoy: Never Do pop-up or pop-under advertisements, its a very well known fact that visitors hate the pop ups and are tend to run away from a site that spams the visitor with tonnes of pop ups.

7. Respect the Big G: Obey the rules of service providers, advertisers and other programs that you are affiliated with, for example AdSense, do not offer them or ask your users to click those ads or use words such as ‘pick a link’ etc, such terms can get you banned not just from the program but from the search engines as well. Use words such as ‘sponsor ads’ instead. Getting banned form search engines means NO traffic.

8. Build links & community: Make sure you submit your site to all top search engines, directories, etc. Write ezine articles for article directories and get back-links to your site, maintain a must follow blogs list and use them to build more back-links. Check out making money by writing to find more useful article sites that you can also use to build a community & make money at the same time.

9. Don’t spam or scam: Do not spam on social media sites or any site for that matter, set your goal every month or week and do not deviate from those, never try to scam or make money illegally, such things might be bountiful for some time but in the long run your in loss. Read how to detect online scams to find out more about what you shouldn’t do in order to be scam & spam safe.

10. Get a new theme: Make sure your website design and layout is user friendly, do not use too many dark or eye irritating colors, get better themes. Attractive themes means more loyal visitors, take a look at these amazing themes.

11. Cloak your links: Cloak your links, do not start using affiliate banners in your advertising space. Get the pretty link wordpress plugin if you have a wordpress blog to automatically cloak all outbound links, just like i do on my blog.

12. Don’t do flash: Don’t use flash banners and too much flash work, search engines don’t detect flash as good as they do words, even if you get your flash content indexed in search engines you will have a hard time ranking them.

13. Build a List: Make sure you offer your visitors RSS feeds and subscriptions, its always advisable to start building a mailing list since the start, you can also create a custom landing page and use list building techniques to build a huge list of opt in subscribers. Offer Free reports, ebooks or products to attract more subscribers. Take a look at my article on how to build a list. Get a auto responder which are the most important list building tools, the top 2 in the industry are aweber & getresponse.

14. Don’t buy traffic: Do NOT waste real money doing blog promotions, blogs with content are not worth promoting with real money on services such as the ‘get paid to’ or ‘opt in lists’ or even the custom ‘traffic’ packages from sites, such traffic is pointless because for a blog the most important traffic is the readers and those who are interested in the niche you are working in, Google AdWords and other advertising networks should be used to promote affiliate products instead.

15. Keep your blog alive: Remove the first default post on the blog, the blog-roll and make sure you adjust your plugins and widgets, this is the step where most ‘new comers’ fail in blogging. Read my post on the must have plugins for wordpress bloggers.

16. Customize your site: Customize your Error pages to give it more professional look, add a custom favicon and custom blog logos to fit your overall blog design. If you don’t know how to add a favicon to your site then read about it on my post.

17. Let them search: Offer search in your site and make sure its visible by the visitor, this helps the reader find what he is looking for.

18. Be Social: Offering links to your other accounts including social networks and twitter is always advisable, this helps build a relation with the visitor and could actually gain you loyal readers.

19. Use a traffic retainer: When users exit from your site,its up to you, if you would like to include a ‘exit pop up’ that could ask your visitors to check out another offer, etc. But this is not advisable for normal content sites and blogs, as it would not work and is most effective on landing pages. Check out this amazing pop up plugin for wordpress blogs if you are interested.

20. Use google Analytic: always analyze your traffic on a daily bases, note down the visitor trends and the change, keep yourself updated to your traffic sources, top landing pages and use this information to optimize your service.

21. Write for people not for bots: Remember what i said about the term ‘traffic’ and the ‘actual traffic’ ? always keep in mind that people visiting your site are real and not bots, so give them real things and make your posts look real, as if your giving a speech or talking to someone on email, the more personal and targeted you get the more the reader will read further. Read how to seo for beginners to learn more about mixing SEO with real content.

22. Be simple: Don’t get too professional, their are many people on the Internet and depending on your niche, specially on a ‘make money online‘ niche, 80% of the visitors to your site might be new comers and they will have a hard time understand your hard use of terms and concepts, so break down your content and information to make sure everyone can understand

23. Give credits: Most traffic is attracted to ‘sources’, which means nothing else but a list of ‘top’ services or ‘top tools’ etc, such source posts are always indexed quickly on search engines and study shows that users spend more time on ‘source’ posts then on other average posts.

24. Check your work: Make sure your posts are spelling free, the font and color of your font are readable, divide your content in paragraphs and/or point-wise this would give a more organized look and feel, which will guarantee a longer stay.

25. Make a point: Highlight and bolder the area or words that are of importance, the semi title and the title, use more eye catching terms for your title of the post. Post title should ALWAYS be search engine keyword related, for example someone looking for ‘twitter tools’ are likely to search with keywords such as ‘twitter tools’ ‘top twitter tools’ etc, so make your posts with similar titles, don’t use titles that are very long, for more information check out my previous posts on how to write great articles and content and how to make money writing.

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ

Twitter is exploding and their is absolutely no reason why we all should not take
advantage of this great social media. – SJ

Twitter is not like most of the social media sites, in fact twitter is a platform for micro blogging and millions of people are using twitter for various purposes with celebrities, bloggers & Internet marketers leading in the race of the twitter domination game. Their is no doubt in twitters power and what it could do to your business but twitter also has its limitations, most people do silly mistakes and could possibly lose a vital opportunity of using twitter. If you are micro blogging using twitter then you need to read them carefully.

Here are the 15 MUST AVOID twitter mistakes that could damage your business or reputation.

1. Using Mass mailing and Direct messaging bots

How is it a mistake?

Most of us tend to think that others will feel much better if we send them direct messages, this is true if you do it manually but not so if you use a bot, because a bot will send message to your twitter followers instantly after they start following you and your followers can easily identify that you are using bot, most of them un-follow and some of them might even report you for spam!

Update: Where did the direct messages go in the new twitter? Twitter has taken care of this problem but now you can use mentions, like @sameerjoad to catch my attention, works similar to direct messaging other then the fact that its open tweeting.

2. Following to your limit

How is it a mistake?

When most of us start on with twitter for the first time we are very eager to grow our followers, in fact some of them try to do that within few days, which is not only impossible to achieve but is very foolish on your part.

Twitter has a max follow limit, you can’t follow after your first 2000 followings unless their are 1850 people following you! If you keep following and hit your limit you will stay their for days and find yourself losing more of your followers as most of them think you are just adding lots of followers in a hope to get them to follow you back and grow your followers in return, but this tactic wont work if you try to do it overnight, specially if you show the follow limit of 2000 for months till you get your own 1850 followers.

Other then just losing your own followers you could also lose your account as twitter hates spammers and can flag you if you follow so many people during any 24hrs period, they will add you to your ‘suspicion list’. The best way to avoid this is to follow only the people you wish to follow for tweets & unfollow those who don’t follow you back.

3. Not unfollowing the non-mutual’s

How is this a mistake?

Non-mutual are basically the people you follow who do not follow you back, if you don’t remove these non-mutual’s from your follow list then your follow list will hit the limit and take your precious space!

Let me put it this way, you have 1000 followers and you follow 2000 yourself, out of these 2000, 1000 of them are non-mutual’s and they do not follow you back, now excluding  the people you love to follow like some celebrity or news tweets etc [who usually don't follow back] there will still be a large number of non-mutual’s, if you don’t remove them, then your followers will grow very slow or might no grow at all! If you removed 600 of them then you could follow 600 others and possibly convert 300 of those 600 into your own followers thus growing your own follower base!

4.Not Following Back

How is this a mistake?

This is a huge mistake on your part, mostly because of 2 reasons

a. you might lose your followers since you are not mutual and occupy their space and they expect you to follow back

b. you could be losing huge information or valuable tweets from those potential followers

their is a exception if your some top celebrity or well know person, but you still miss a lot on  reason ‘b’.

Update 2011: I recommend to NOT follow everyone who follows you, specially the fake twitters (dating profiles, etc), the inactive ones, the overactive ones (who tweet more then 25 times a day), the spammers (who only tweet with links), the self promoters or weblogs (Internet marketers promoting their make money online offers or spamming you with links), the wannabes (fans of celebrities), etc. Why is that? Because you will have hundreds if not thousands of tweets on your home page & it really gets annoying when things start cluttering up.

5. Not Optimizing twitter

How is this a mistake?

Not optimizing twitter means that your just using the basic twitter layout both on your twitter homepage and on your personal sites.

This mistake won’t affect you a lot, but changing the background, writing a short bio, linking to your website and good logos can really boost your rate of followers and popularity among fellow tweeples!

You might have noticed that even i myself did not do a lot of optimization mostly because i am lazy and too busy but their is no excuse when it comes to making money out of twitter. (i have added it this to my to do list, so i expect my twitter profile to change soon).

Also if you just use a link on your own site or blog to your twitter account then your less likely to get noticed then using images, icons, plugin’s or awesome widgets!

Using a ‘tweet this post’ widget can really bring you a lot of viral traffic and indulging yourself in other twitter related site like twittercounter.com or tweetmeme.com can really be a boost, but always be careful if that site is legit.

Update 2011: You can use ‘addtoany’ or other social promotion tools to take advantage of all the different social media platforms & not just twitter!

6. Re-Tweeting Multiple people at same time

How is this a mistake?

Re-Tweeting or RT for short means you tweet someone else’s tweet and giving proper credit to the original twitter.

RTing can be fun, exciting and very useful because not only you share someone else’s message to your follower and gain their respect but at the same time let your followers get variety other then your usual tweets with new content, it can be viral also.

Now you must be wondering what is wrong with RTing? Well the mistake is in the method you do it!

Mostly the correct way to do it is like this

RT @Sameerjoad – Hey check out this new video at youtube.com

but most people wants to RT multiple tweets at the same time and they do it like this

RT@Sameerjoad , RT@mr.x, RT@mr.y……..etc

such users tend to think that all of their followers will actually click each of those users to check their tweets from your single tweet, this would never work!

in fact some people find it very annoying and can actually start blocking you or un-follow you or even report you!

So avoid multi RTing in same tweet, if your very lazy then just don’t RT it at all!

Update 2011: Twitter has taken care of this & now there is a automatic retweet function, using @ tags now serves as mentioning, yet again mentioning to many people at the same time can be a bad thing.

7. Self Promotion and limitations

How is this a mistake?

limiting your twitter usage to only promoting your products and services can be very bad for you, you know you are self promoting if your doing one of the below, so stop these activities if you wish to build a community & good following.

a. Calling yourself a ‘social media expert’ or ‘guru’ in your twitter bio or telling others that they can ‘make money online‘ or ‘increase their twitter followers’ in your ‘bio’ shows your sole purpose on twitter is self promotion and making money, this should be avoided as you will find yourself losing lots of followers. Twitter is a social media site and you should use it like one, be original and let your bio space limited to your bio only.

b. tweeting only about your site, products or links will result in followers running away from you as your giving them only business talks and links and the only people who will be following you are those who are doing the same as you are doing, thus resulting in loss of potential customers.

c. tweeting the same message more then once - some people or all of us know that even if you have 10000 followers the chance of your tweet being read by all of them is close to zero, because they will be following so many people and have many tweets following around or simply because they are not around at the time you tweet. Because of this some people tweet same message over and over and over and some do that more then 100 times in a week. This is considered spamming.

your followers will find it annoying and will go away.

Update 2011: According to recent study, the exposure to your tweets depend on the amount of followers you have, their level of activity, the number of followers they have & the message of your tweet. A tweeter account with 10k followers will see an exposure of 100 – 500 eyeballs on average, with a CTR of 0.7 – 10% depending on the tweet itself.

8. Using Twitter as social network

How is this a mistake?

Many people argue about this, but the sooner you realize the better it will be, twitter is not a social networking site, it is a social media platform. Its NOT like facebook, myspace or other top social networks, you can’t have the same level of privacy, features or usage as that of a social network.

Why am i telling you this? because twitter is a micro-blogging platform, it does not have all the features as that of a normal social network site, you won’t find your friends enjoying twitter the way they do in facebook and you should get used to it also, twitter has its own advantages.

What am trying to say is that on normal social networking sites, all you basically do is add friends, do some wall posting, upload pictures and most of us check our facebook or myspace few times a week or daily, but twitter is not the same and you will defiantly need more effort to get noticed, so use twitter for what its meant to be used for, what are you doing? but of course not limited to that only, in other words don’t try force your friends or net workers to join twitter if they are your friends on facebook, some of them might not find it useful while others might.

Update 2011: Twitter is starting to bring in more social networking features & with so many twitter based services such as twitpic, etc you can do quite the same. But yet again twitter is not a social network but a social media platform, that does not mean that you cannot network with people on twitter, commonly known as tweeples.

9. Tweeting in different languages

How is this a mistake?

Although its good to have people from all around the world using twitter and having them as your followers, but everyone knows that basic language of twitter is English.

I don’t know about the legal issues you might have to face if you send a tweet in a different languages since i never did that myself, but tweeting in another language could also kill your followers as not all might be from your same place, or knowing that particular language, not all might be having that language pack installed in their browsers so your just loosing more followers if you did that.

And since English is know to all of twitter users [if they didn't know it they won't be their!] its much advisable to tweet in English unless you promote a specific thing in a specific region or have read and understood twitters terms and conditions.

Twitter has a set of their own languages so if your language is not included i recommend you not tweet in that and contact twitter staff for more questions.

Update 2011: You can tweet in different languages, but be careful if your followers are English speakers. Tweeting in your local language if allowed by twitter can actually be an advantage in getting local followers & more exposure via twitter search.

10. Trusting anything and everything

How is this a mistake?

With the rise in twitter’s success there has been a steady increase  in the number of scam sites as well.

Twitter unlike other social media sites grants access to other ‘applications’ to access your twitter account from their sites, other social sites allows the applications to link to them first and then provides users with a database of applications to choose and use.

This feature of twitter is very unsafe, since their are tonnes of website who could tell you that they are a twitter application and promote something like ‘get 10000 visitors in 1 week’ and to sign up they ask you to enter your account information usually your twitter account information, some of these sites are legal and not doing anything suspicious but not all are like that. That’s why you should be careful specially from sites that may look just like twitter [such links might be promoted to you by others or even in DM from your twitter account and thus catching your attention unnoticed]

Twitter.com scam sites

Update 2011: In just 2 short years twitter has done lots of changes, recent changes in twitters developer & API access services now make it impossible for scam sites to operate, twitter also monitors all twitter based sites using their network & API. So i guess this problem has been solved. However there are still sites floating around that asks you to ‘Enter your login details’ in order to use the service they offer, NEVER do this as twitter has made it clear that all twitter based services should use the twitter developer app API.

11. Using multiple accounts on twitter

How is this a mistake?

Its not hidden that many people actually have multiple twitter accounts, they might be using one for business another for personal purpose and some even have 10 accounts dedicated to their 10 different sites or services, this not only requires them to manage and tweet on 10 accounts but they actually try and get the same number of followers on each one, it becomes very annoying for your followers and very hard for you to actually manage multiple accounts!

That’s why its always advisable to use 1 single twitter account even if you promote multiple services because not only this gains you large number of followers but customers or users of 1 site knows your other services and sites form your tweets thus helping increase traffic.

Update 2011: It is legal to use multiple accounts on twitter, however if found spamming even on one account you risk all your accounts connected to that IP. Please remember that multiple accounts are hard to maintain & can be a daunting task, so think before you proceed.

12. Faking to be someone else

How is this a mistake?

Twitter lets you create a user account and almost all great and well known companies have their twitter accounts!

But some smart people in order to gain popularity and followers they try to fake themselves to be someone else, their have been recent cases of a top celebrity or well known names/personalities using twitter, but later those twitter users were confirmed to be fakes and they had to face several punishments for celebrity impostor!

in fact twitter recently launched a celebrity impostor act to protect the identities of those celebrities, so if your found doing so not only will you lose your twitter accounts, face legal actions but you might even end up facing online harassment’s from those millions of fans, don’t play someone be yourself!

Update 2011: You can get banned for faking to be someone if reported by the original person. Twitter has a verified account system for real celebrities, unless you don’t have that verified badge you risk account banning even if you are the real celebrity.

13. Not Protecting and claiming your id or brand

How is this a mistake?

Just as faking to be someone is a mistake, not protecting your brand id and your public profile is a mistake on your part also.

Specially for people who have multiple products, services and websites, these brand owners find themselves in hardship as sometimes the smart twitterholics will register accounts with your brand name, and cause you loss of traffic and income, in fact they can damage your identity and drive your customers away by posting unwanted or painful content about you or your service.

Lets say for example you have a site called ‘make money with me’ and you have another site called ‘learn to blog with me’, now you go on twitter and register yourself a account which might be just your normal name like ‘sameerjoad’ even though you might use the same account for all your sites, someone out there might register a twitter account that goes with your site names, and he could be making money from your products, service and sites. (affiliate marketers do that, shocking but true!)

This is why you must protect your brand id, even if you don’t use those so many accounts you can create them as a safe keep for the sake of protecting your ID and you can divert all traffic or followers of those accounts to your original account.

14. Selling/buying twitter accounts

How is this a mistake?

Twitter does NOT allow you to sell your twitter accounts and it is against their policy if you do so, but still their are people with the same ideology that ‘rules are meant to be broken’ and they do break them, if you think you can make a account with 1000 followers and then later sell it to someone then you better be careful as twitter is watching you.

Selling accounts on twitter has grown recently with the growth of twitter, this has been mostly related with people who do identity faking and then later sell those accounts to the original owners to make some quick cash, but doing this can get your accounts[all of them] banned and your twitter days are over.

Also if found doing so by your followers[which is obvious since the tweets will change] they will start unfollowing you as well, so even buying twitter accounts with 10000 followers is useless and illegal, so watch where you put your money it might just get wasted.

Stay safe don’t try illegal tricks to make a quick buck, its my job to warn you the rest is up to you.

15. Using bots/hacks and scripts on twitter.

How is this a mistake?

It is very well known that no one can use twitter to its maximum potential without using other applications, their are tonnes of twitter applications, bots, scripts and hacks, almost all are legal but not 100% of all.

In fact scripts like ‘tweet this post’ or RT or auto add etc are not bad at all, they make your twitter experience very quick, smooth and gives you the ability to utilize twitter to its full potential. But hacks and scripts that are made by 3rd parties or anyone with a scripting knowledge can be very risky, in fact using hacks and bots like direct mailing are very annoying and will affect you indirectly.

Twitter scripts like auto tweets, which keeps posting a pre-written message after intervals of time is very annoying and risky, because twitter is a platform for you to express yourself, not a place where you keep tweeting auto spam messages all day around.

There are many ‘do it yourself’ guides on the Internet where some self proclaimed gurus teach you how to create your own twitter plugins, ads, hacks, scripts and bots and most of them ask you to insert codes pre-written by them in your site files, like the theme file or plugin directory of wordpress, such things can mess up your blog or site if you don’t have any knowledge and can even infect your servers, this has happened before and the infections could lead to you having issues with your hosting company. (Similar tricks are used for facebook, using javascripts!)

And last but not the least using scripts,bots and hacks takes the fun away from the real twitter experience which is tweeting on your own and not making tweets that contains lots of links or a one that goes of every single minute, this could effect your followers interest in your service.

That’s all for 15 must avoid twitter mistakes, took me around 2 days researching and writing on it but always ready to help.

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ